In recent years, in the manufacture of semiconductor integrated circuits and fine optical elements, technologies for processing fine patterns has further become important, and one of such technology is an imprinting method.
The imprinting method is a technology for transferring a fine pattern to a surface of a substrate by pressing a mold having a concavo-convex pattern that corresponds to a fine pattern that is desired to be formed on the surface of the substrate (hereinafter referred to as a “mold”) against a material to be transferred/formed on the surface of the substrate. A fine pattern of a nano-order can be formed by this technology.
As the imprinting method, a photo imprinting method and a thermal imprinting method are known depending on the difference in the physical properties of materials to be transferred and processing methods. Among these, a photo imprinting method using a photocurable resin composition as the material to be transferred gains attention since the method has advantages making heating unnecessary, deformation of a pattern is little since the pattern can be formed at room temperature, and the positions of the substrate and mold are easily adjusted by using a transparent mold (for example, Patent Literature 1).
Molds that are generally used in this imprinting method include molds formed of quartz and metals such as nickel. In a mold made of quartz, a pattern is formed on a quartz substrate or the like by a semiconductor fine processing technology such as photolithography or etching. A mold made of a metal is formed by performing metal plating by using an electric casting (electroforming) method (for example, a nickel plating method) on a surface of a mold made of quartz, and peeling off this plated metal layer.
However, the molds prepared by such methods had problems making them very expensive and requiring long periods for the preparation.
Under such circumstances, a mold obtained by transferring a pattern on a resin by using the above-mentioned mold as a master mold, and using this as a mold made of a resin, is disclosed.
The following Non-patent Literature 1 discloses a resin mold prepared by using a photocurable resin composition formed of a fluorinated urethane methacrylate represented by the following formula and a photopolymerization initiator. However, regarding the disclosed resin mold, Non-patent Literature 1 does not describe the durability of the resin mold in the case when transferring is repetitively performed by using the resin mold. In addition, according to a test by the inventors, it was proven that the above-mentioned resin mold is not sufficient with respect to the durability in the case when transferring is repetitively performed by using the resin mold.
